apple juice

Doug just showed me how to use my espresso maker. Its buzz-a-licious!

Why Democrats Should Be Thankful

The only solace for sullen Democrats is that now Republicans might have to clean up their own fiscal mess. The fiscal record of the past four years has been one of unmitigated—and seemingly intentional—irresponsibility. A Republican Congress working with a Republican president created the massive new Medicare prescription-drug entitlement, passed a new, subsidy-crammed farm bill, committed hundreds of billions of dollars to war efforts, and loaded up on pork-barrel spending. Meanwhile, taxes were reduced—on wage earners, investors, and companies. The end result: We collected about the same amount of taxes in fiscal 2004 as we did in fiscal 1999. But we spent 34 percent more.

A large amount of people in the country are currently believing (taking it on faith, I guess) that Bush has done or will do a good job with fiscal issues. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. It doesn’t bode well for the country when they believe they got a mandate (when did 51% become a mandate?), and will most likely govern with promises of “tax-relief”, while at the same time spending even more.

Apparently through a lifetime of privelege and irresponsibility, no one ever taught these guys that when you charge stuff on the credit card, you generally are expected to pay it back.

But in this case, paying it back means taxing your unborn children and grandchildren to death.

I pulled this from a Minneapolis email list that I am on,

No matter how you cut it, this was a great day for voter turn out in MN.

77% of eligible voters turned out, 95% of registered voters showed up.

That makes me feel good.

Well, Kerry just gave his concession speech, Bush is supposed to be on soon.

I’m pretty worn out from my volunteering yesterday. I knocked on about 450 doors in 11 hours yesterday. It was tiring but satisfying. Basically I just asked if they had voted, and if they knew where their polling place was, and told them how to register if they weren’t registered.

I haven’t had any free moments yet to gather together the obviously disapointing result. But I did read Joshua Marshall’s thoughts, and I think that they are worthy of sharing.

In some ways this would all be conceptually easier for Democrats to deal with if President Bush had managed a realignment of our politics in the post-9/11 world. But when I look at the results from last night what I see is that they are virtually identical to four years ago. Pretty much the same states going each way and a very close to even race — though of course the president’s 51% makes all the difference in the world.

As I said, if the Dems had been crushed, that would be one thing. If the American people were coalescing away from them, etc. But that’s not what has happened here. In 2000 the country was divided into two (increasingly hostile) camps. And it’s still exactly the same way. If anything it seems only more entrenched — perhaps symbolically and geographically captured by the flip between New Hampshire and New Mexico from 2000.

Read the full post, it’s well worth it.

I’ll post some more thoughts soon… and my list of possible countries to move to. 😉

I was at my polling place at 6:40am this morning, it opened at 7am. This was the line behind me when I got there.

By the time I voted, that line was 3 times as long, and the little voting machine said 94 people had voted.

I’m off to knock on doors and get people to the polls. Go vote!